My Vagina, or In Defense of Freedom of Choice
By Dallas Denny
Copyright 1998 by Dallas Denny This article originally appeared in AEGIS
News, 1(3), March, 1995. It resulted in a $500 donation for AEGIS, and in
several angry letters from wives of transgender-women-living-without-surgery who
took offense at the opening paragraphs, and attacked me, rather than my ideas.
"No real woman would write about her body like that," wrote one. I sent her the
URL of Annie Sprinkle's "Public Cervix Announcement."
My vagina is warm and wet and wonderful. Sometimes, when I
am walking in a skirt, wearing only panties underneath, I can feel the labia
pushing together as I walk, giving just a little bit of stimulation to my
clitoris, making me feel feminine and sexy. Sometimes I sit in my office with the
door closed, my index finger moving rapidly inside me, my cheeks flushed, my clit
hard again the ball of my finger. Sometimes I lie in bed and make love with a
vibrator, or with a partner, arching my back and moaning and panting as orgasm
approaches.
Every once in a while, at a business meeting or in a movie
theater, I get the slightest whiff of my vagina. It is an earthy, musky scent, a
woman-odor, not unpleasant to me, although I confess that a lifetime of exposure
to feminine hygiene product advertisements makes me apprehensive that others
might smell it, and that leads me to douche more frequently than I might otherwise.
I'm very proud of my vagina, the more so because I wasn't born with it. It is a
human-made vagina, a neovagina, a product of cooperation between my flesh and the
scalpel of a Belgian surgeon named Michel Seghers. I bought it with money and
sweat, and it is part and parcel of who and what I am. But it took entirely too
much mountain-moving to get it.
There were other things which were more important to me than having a vaginafor instance, getting rid of the
facial hair which I did not feel belonged on my face, and the testosterone which
I did not feel belonged in my body but getting it was important enough for
me to play surgical roulette, exchanging a bird-in-the-hand penis, testicles, and
scrotum, and my reproductive potential, for a bird in-the-bush, bush.
As much as
I appreciate my vagina, I do not imbue it or the three-hour surgical procedure
which created it with any mystical significance. I realize its limitations, and
its differences from non-surgical vaginas. I don't mind that it is made from
penile and scrotal tissue, and that it doesn't have infinite depth. I'm proud to
have a transsexual vagina. But mostly, I'm just glad it's there. Getting my
vagina was a major event in the course of my life, just as were being born,
graduating from college, and getting married. Acquiring it was certainly a
milestone, but it was not the end of a journey for me, or the beginning of a "new
life"; it was just a stop along the stagecoach route to change the horses. Having
it has made me happy in little and important, but not earth-shaking ways. It has
not magically changed my life, or even opened any doors that were closed (except
in the sack, and, oh yes, the New Woman Conference, which is closed to those
without vaginas or neovaginas). And yet, if my old equipment were to grow back, I
would be back in Brussels as quick as you can say "four thousand dollars."
What I am saying here is that having a vagina was, and is, of personal
importance to me. To me. It might not be to other gender-transgressing people,
and I can appreciate that. And I know that to some people born vaginally
handicapped, having a vagina is a matter of life-and-death, and I can appreciate
that, too. Does having a vagina make me any more a woman than if I had a
penis? No. Women are not judged by their vaginas, nor men by their penises,
except when in bed with their lovers, and most people are not their lovers. Being
a man or woman has to do with self-identification, and with the way one lives his
or her life. After all, in social situations, people interact with people, and
not vaginas and penises. Genitals are a personal matter, and there is no
legitimate reason for differentiating people into categories because they lack or
possess a vagina or penis. After all, the same person can have one set of
genitals during one part of life, and not at another, a fact to which I can
attest. Having a vagina can be good, if you want one, or bad, if you don't.
Having a penis can be a blessing or a curse. It's a relative thing. Those who
want a penis or vagina should be allowed to have one, and no one who doesn't want
one should be forced to have one. It's as simple as that. It's when penises or vaginas (or lack of them) are used as political tools to oppress people, and
as weapons to attack them, that I begin to have a problem. And that is being done
in the transgender community. It happens when pre-operative or non-operative
transsexual people, and transgenderists, and crossdressers, and
non-gender-transgressing men are excluded from forums like the New Woman's
Conference because they have penises, or are excluded from Tri-Ess because they
no longer have a penis, or would just as soon not have one. It happens at the
Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which excludes people born with penises, people
who used to have a penis, people who used to not have a penis but now do, people
who do not have penises but look as if they might, and people who have something
that might be a penis, but nobody is sure. It happens any time those who have
acquired vaginas use them to exclude those who do not have them, and when certain
(i.e. surgically created) classes of vaginas or penises are defined as
undesirable. It happens also when people are attacked for making the decision to
acquire a vagina or a penis. Mary Daly has called transsexuals
"Frankensteinian," and her disciple Janice Raymond considers transsexual women to
be giant walking penises who violate women's bodies and spaces
(Gyn-Ecology and The Transsexual Empire, respectively). Lesbian
separatists have attempted to steal away our powers of self-definition by
attacking transsexual people in a variety of forums and excluding transsexual
women from woman-only events. Psychoanalysts have called sex reassignment surgery
"psychosurgery," "collusion with delusion," and "collaboration with psychosis."
They believe that transgender identification is a mental illness, and should be
"cured," not by changing the body but by eliminating the wish. Behavior
therapists and psychiatrists attempt to give them tools with which to do that:
aversion therapy and psychoactive medications, respectivley. It's bad enough
that genital surgery has so many enemies from without the transgender
community but it also has enemies from within. Surgically altered genitals
have also come attack from those in the transgender community who have made the
decision to live without them. This usually manifests as concern about
"self-identified transsexuals" who "don't know what they're getting into," but
the transphobia which underlies it is not difficult to detect, whether it comes
from the mouth, or pen, of Virginia-don't-cut-off-your-dick-Prince, or from Olga
Gordene Mackenzie, who has written that "'Happy' endings rarely occur in
transsexuals who undergo surgery." (Transgender Nation, p. 19). The literature
of the transgender community is full of articles about those who wish to have
surgery, defining them as impulsive, out of touch with reality, unstable, unable
to distinguish between sex and gender, and otherwise diminished in intelligence
and common sense. Invariably, those arguments are written by people who do not
have, and have never had vaginas, or who do have a vagina and are married or
otherwise in a relationship with someone who does not have one, but wants one.
Excuse me. If it is politically incorrect for white people to write about the
Black experience, and for straight people to write about being gay, what makes it
appropriate for the neovaginally and neopenilely deficient to write about the
surgical experience, thank you very much? It is certainly true that many
transsexual people are ill-prepared for, and perhaps even unsatisfactory
candidates for surgerybut that is an area for discussion between
transsexual people and those who provide medical and psychological services.
Others have no place in the dialogue. Transsexual people, as a class, are perfectly capable of making choices about their lives and their bodies. We
really don't need nontranssexuals attempting to limit our options by attributing
negative characteristics to us. I'm very happy that this is a world in which
women can have penises and men can have vaginas, and I am very happy for those
who value and cherish their genitals, and hope they never malfunction and that
the possessors have a good time with them. But I am entirely supportive of those
who wish to change their genitals, and of those who have actually done so, and I
am fed up with those who attack others for what they do or do not do with their
genitals. There is room enough in the world for all of us to be what we desire
and need to be. None of us should be excluded or feel superior to others because
we have or have not modified our genitals with surgery. Dallas Denny
American Educational Gender Information Service, Inc. (AEGIS) P.O. Box
33724 Decatur, GA 30033-0724 770-939-2128 aegis@gender.org
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